When I started blogging, I did so with the idea that I should probably include a relevant photo or video with each blog post. I never really adhered to that idea, but it was put into my head because I had read that readers really like photos. And indeed, I personally like to see relevant and original photos accompanying other people’s blog posts. (I do get annoyed by photos that are stock photos, or sensationalist irrelevant photos (of celebrities or such) that seem designed to draw traffic.)

I have not taken many photos or videos recently. Why? I am faced with a kind of moral dilemma I have not quite resolved.

At some point some months ago I signed up for Pinterest, just because. I never used my account, but have been receiving notifications that people are following me. I presume this is happening through Facebook or Twitter contact lists. I have still never used my account. I have not yet looked at a single item on Pinterest, nor have I posted anything. So I am baffled by the Pinterest phenomenon.

I suppose this reflects my general disinterest in visual objects. I’m not particularly interested in art, for example, or photography. I do not customize my computer Desktop, and I do not put up posters or paintings or any other decorations at home or at work. I accept all the default colors of every computer program I use. I wear only a few basic colors of clothing, and am completely uninterested in clothing style. I don’t really care what color my car is or what its shape is; to me a car is just an abstract data type that has properties such as efficiency, safety, and methods such as “drive” and “park”.

When I’m outside, I like best to look at what are not discrete objects. I love looking at the sky, at clouds, at an entire line of forest. I like to see sand on a beach, and the waves, the curvature of the horizon. I like even more to close my eyes and hear the wind, hear the water, hear the birds. I like to close my eyes when listening to music intently at a concert.

I wonder how many people are like me and don’t take to Pinterest at all. Just curious.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about joining the Carnegie Mellon All-University Orchestra, the first orchestra I have ever been in. I wrote of my terror as I realized that as a total beginner at flute, I was basically unable to play any of the music handed out.

I decided to work very hard at improving my flute skills to see whether I could get good enough in time to make it to the April 15 concert in respectable shape. I believe this is the most ambitious goal I have ever set for myself in my entire life. Not because it is the hardest goal to achieve, but because of the time pressure involved. If I were given eight months, I would say, yes, I can do it; it took me eight months to start playing the recorder and then be sufficiently skilled (at merely an intermediate level) to play easy music in a concert. But two months is another story.

Furthermore, the day of reckoning is not April 15. I feel it is next Sunday.

About two weeks ago Abby and I started a daily meditation practice in the morning. We’re still at it.

Recently I’ve seen some articles about meditation habits and difficulty.

The plain fact is that meditation is hard. There might be some kind of stereotype of meditation as “relaxing” or as blissing out or some such thing, but actually, meditation is quite hard.

Why is it so hard, and does putting effort into it somehow violate the point of it?

I’ve always had trouble keeping up an optimal exercise routine in the winter months, because it’s colder and less pleasant to be outside. Historically, unless I was very disciplined, I have had some bad winters in which I didn’t get much exercise, ate and slept poorly, and gained over five pounds of pure fat.

So I have been very happy that at Carnegie Mellon University, a “fitness challenge” has been in place in the winter since January 2011. The fitness challenge was very helpful last winter in getting me to stay active, and it is being helpful right now as well: I am starting the second of six weeks now:

Welcome to the fitness-challenge for 2012 “Strive to Thrive” - you have
taken the first step by signing up to make a commitment to yourself and
your health by working out 4 times a week for 20 min. The challenge
starts Monday Jan 30th. There is a fitness challenge bulletin board in
the UC. If your name is not on the board yet please add your name the
next time you are in the UC. Once you work out for 20 min please put up
your sticker. We are going to have different colored stars and each color
of the stars represent a different type of exercise. A RED star is for
Group X-ercise class, a SILVER star is for Walking, Jogging, Treadmill,
Exercise Bike, Octane, Rower, Elliptical or AMT, a BLUE star is for
Swimming or a Water Activity, a GREEN star is for Weightlifting or other
Machines and a YELLOW star is for playing a sport. You can get your star
stickers @ the UC equipment desk. Everyday you will be receiving an email
from our interns from Pitt that will be motivating you to continue your
“Strive to Thrive” - have fun, good luck and we’ll all be thriving by
Spring break! It takes 6 weeks to develop a habit and you have just
started yours.

Why it works

Why does the fitness challenge work (for some of us; note how many people signed up and never even put up a single sticker during the first week)?

First, they offered a “free gift” for signing up. Some people get tricked into signing up as a result. Fact is, the free gift is really crappy and I didn’t want it (a hand sanitizer dispenser full of nasty chemicals that I know I don’t need and give me an allergic reaction).

Second, they offer a special awards lunch after the fitness challenge. Judging by how many people show up for this, it’s clearly something people look forward to. For many, it’s a social experience, and we get certificates also. Not such a big deal to me, but when it comes to motivation, every little trick counts. Like, if I’ve only marked three days and only need to do a fourth, I might think, I just need to exercise one more day in order to stay “in the running” for that free lunch and certificate of completion. Silly tricks like this work.

Third, there is the element of public shame. This is the biggest factor for me. Even though I am quite sure nobody I know is scanning the bulletin board every week to see whether I am exercising, it doesn’t matter: I don’t like the idea of seeing empty spaces on the board in my row, or anyone, even random strangers, seeing them. It is not strictly rational, I admit, but the first thing I think, when I’m not all excited on a given day about exercising is, I want my stars to fill up those spaces on the board.

Conclusion

I expect to do whatever it takes to get to attend the awards lunch for the CMU fitness challenge. And it doesn’t take that much. Typically, once I go through the trouble of actually putting on my running shoes or going to the gym locker room, I have no problem putting in an intense half hour workout and getting into it.

I am grateful to Pattye Stragar of CMU and all the interns who got the CMU fitness challenge program started and send us inspiring email reminders every day to keep up interested and motivated.

Lately there has been a lot of attention paid to deliberate practice. I thought I’d give one example of my practice habits.

Over a week ago, at a birthday party, I ended up playing two casual games of chess, my first games of chess in an entire year since I completely quit playing the game (either in tournaments or casually) in order to focus on rebooting my passion for playing music.

The first game was against someone who opened with 1 h4, immediately marking himself as a beginner, and I won quickly.

The second game was much harder, because while my opponent was clearly not a strong player, and as White started off with an inferior opening, I had a hard time coming up with a crushing advantage. In fact, I found myself embarking on a slow, misguided plan that led to an equal middle game. It was only after a terrible blunder on his part that I immediately had a won position.

So overall, these casual games were quite one-sided.

But the next morning, the first thing I did was enter the moves of both games into my computer and briefly analyze the games with Houdini.

Why did I do this?

Yesterday morning, on a sunny day, with temperatures ranging from around 35-40F, Abby and I went on a Meetup hike at Frick Park. This was actually our first Meetup hike in Frick Park, because normally we just go to our local park alone and go to Meetup hikes that are further away, but we hadn’t been hiking at all for months and so it was convenient to go to this one.

Since we live only two miles away from the meeting place in the parking lot down in Fern Hollow, we hiked straight from home there, meeting up with John, who joined us at the park entrance.

We ended up hiking probably around nine miles (including being on the road from and to home).

It was very strange doing this hike in early February, when Pittsburgh should be suffering from snow and ice and bitter cold. Normally I don’t do any running or hiking in Frick Park again till March, but I’ve been running in Frick for some time now this “winter”!

Over a decade ago, when I got very serious about running in races, and decided to get as competitive as I possibly could (knowing that my genetic potential was very limited), I settled on the Jack Daniels “running formula” training program as something that worked quite well for me. It was scientifically based and involves training in different phases of an entire months-long process at different intensities, incorporating easy running, tempo runs, intervals, repeats, hill workouts, etc.

The beauty of Jack Daniels’ Running Formula (I had used the first edition, not the second) was that it gave pace tables to use. I would do my runs with a watch, and spent a good amount of time at the Carnegie Mellon University track on certain workouts (although I always preferred running on the trails to running on the roads or the track).

After reaching my peak racing years, I devoted less and less time to training. As I began running four days a week, or three, I had to look for more efficient ways to maintain my fitness.

Intensity

What I found, for my circumstance and for my body, was that higher-intensity training with rest days actually worked pretty way, compared to running more days and more mileage. There is, of course, perpetual controversy in the elite circles over whether high mileage or high intensity is the way to go for optimal results (including, of course, avoidance of injury). But I was never an elite runner, so in a sense, the controversy is not very important to me.

Nevertheless, eventually I came to believe that more is not better. In addition, I came to believe that changing things up is more important than following a fixed, supposedly “scientific” plan. This is not only because of the practical fact that often plans need to be changed anyway (because of illness, injury, work and travel commitments, etc.), but also because the body adapts to routine. I have to shake things up periodically in order to progress, whether it’s changing how I eat or how I write a computer program.

It turns out that the past decade has seen the focus on intermittent intensity become mainstream, for everyone, not just would-be competitive athletes. I think this has been a very good development. Along with this change has been, of course, the focus on proper warmups, dynamic stretching, pre-hab. It is folly to do intense work without having the stability to withstand forces that could cause injury.

Billat workouts

One intense running workout I like to do is based on research by Véronique Billat

If you read that article, and aren’t familiar with VO2max and similar measures of fitness, don’t worry. Here’s a more accessible exposition and recommendations.

Personally, as I begin running again early in the season, I enjoy doing the 30-30 workout. I don’t know my exact vVO2max (and don’t care what it is), but years of experience have led me to know from my body what is approximately mile pace, and use that as an approximation of vVO2max.

So I’ll go and warm up jogging slowly for a mile, then beginning the cycle of running hard for 30 seconds and a recovery jog for 30 seconds, and repeat the cycle for about two miles (or however long before I can no longer keep up the pace reasonably) and cool down and be done for the day.

I don’t actually wear a watch to tick down 30 seconds. Instead, I count steps. Assuming a stride rate of approximately 180 per minute (I realize this varies for me depending on my pace), that’s 3 steps per second, and therefore 30 seconds is 90 steps, or 45 steps for each leg.

I like to do this about once a week.

As of a week ago, I have developed two daily habits to reclaim my life from a distracting digital world:

• meditation in the morning, before breakfast
• shutting down my computer at home in the evening two hours before going to bed

Meditation

The meditation habit is one I have wanted to develop for years now, but had not. Before around 2007, I was meditating every day for a year or two, but then I fell off the practice, and eventually stopped for long periods of time, and then just a year ago, thanks to a weekly meditation practice set up at Carnegie Mellon University, I began attending that (and Abby started meditating for the first time then).

I always felt guilty during the entire past year when noting that I wasn’t regularly meditating at home. I knew that “I’m too tired” or “I don’t have time” are never valid excuses to avoid doing something one feels one “should” do. Those excuses almost always mean that something has gone wrong with priorities.

The fact is, I was caught up with a huge number of projects, and became more and more unbalanced, especially when I lost the CMU practice for two months since it was no longer happening (thanks to the CMU academic calendar).

Last week, Abby and I decided that we would meditate in the morning before breakfast, and keep it at ten minutes. Who doesn’t have ten minutes in a day, especially for something that, for me, gives me benefits that last the entire day? So we’ve established this new routine.

More on the morning routine

In conjunction with the new meditation routine, I also decided that I would not check email or the Web generally until after meditation, and unless there was an emergency, I would not deal with email until after breakfast.

Also, I have decided to significantly reduce reading the Web (through my blog subscriptions or Twitter feed) in the morning, so that I keep my morning focused. Now I’ll check the Web mostly at lunch time.

Evening information diet

Furthermore, I have cut out a good bit of computer time from my evening also, in order to promote better sleep as well as doing other things, such as reading paper (gasp!) books.

This has been a difficult cut, but I have managed so far, and yes, there have been repercussions. I have been doing less blog writing (because that happens on the computer), less Web reading, less tweeting. I have a large backlog of interesting Web articles that I’ve simply bookmarked without reading, and I have to confess that I’m not happy about this situation.

Conclusion

I have yet to figure out the best balance to achieve in this digital age given my thirst for fresh ideas and information that are so easy to come by online, but I know for sure that I do not want to sacrifice essential calmness, exercise, sleep, and social time for the sake of addictive information overload that in the long run is not as beneficial as one might hope. What do I really need to know about? And how much of it can I apply? And even given that I have received much of value online, what is the opportunity cost of not using the time spent online on pursuits off-line? These are very hard questions for me to answer, so I’m taking my information diet one step at a time.

I have not written about my flute activities since a month ago, but that’s not for lack of action: in fact, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the flute, at the expense of other personal projects, including writing.

Two months ago, I mentioned that I was considering joining the Carnegie Mellon All-University Orchestra, which I claimed was “not very good” and that “I don’t have to be super good to be a part of it.” I take back those comments.

I joined the CMU AUO two Sundays ago, attending the first rehearsal then, and it was one of the most frightening experiences in my entire life. I almost left before even entering the rehearsal room. But I went in, stayed for the two and a half hours, and last Sunday, I went to the second rehearsal.

Let me put it this way: at the first rehearsal, there were about ten flutes and one piccolo in the flute section. At the second rehearsal, we are down to four flutes and one piccolo. I hope that we don’t lose any more flutes at the next rehearsal. OK, maybe some students happened to be busy and will be returning. Or maybe some of them had the same reaction that I had: absolute terror.

Let me explain.